Daniel Hannan's next campaign: ending decimalisation

Conservative peer Daniel Hannan is a man nostalgic for the way things used to be – all the more so if they happen to be things he could not possibly remember.

Last year, the ‘Brain of Brexit’ wrote a misty-eyed column for the website Conservative Home, recalling his memories of that day in May 1979 when Margaret Thatcher was first elected prime minister. It ended, he said, “the sense of despair that hung about the country like a cold mist in the late 1970s”.

Hannan remembered: “I recall being shocked at the way adults talked. Britain was finished, they were forever telling me. Things were going to the dogs. It was time to emigrate. Remarkably similar to how people talk now, in fact.

“A three-day week, a Conservative government setting prices and incomes, trade union barons being better-known household names than cabinet ministers, double-digit inflation, 83 per cent income tax, power cuts, strikes. It did indeed feel as if Britain was finished.”

Suggested Reading

Truss back on tour with Trump

Rats in a Sack

Remarkable memories – and all the more so since, in May 1979, Hannan was not only seven years old but living in Peru. How precocious to be learning the name of trade union barons from a poultry farm outside Chaclacayo at such a tender age!

Now Hannan is once more heading down false memory lane, this time bemoaning the decision by Harold Wilson’s government to introduce decimalisation of UK’s currency in 1967, a move which took effect in February 1971.

Posting a picture on, inevitably, X of the coins folk wrestled with prior to the change, Lord Hannan wrote: “Fifty-five years ago #OTD we sundered ourselves from our fathers, replacing our handsome and ancient coinage with a decimal system.” His post garnered hundreds of comments from those still mourning the change, including “I’d bring it back in a heartbeat”, “A lovely sound the made too, clinking in your pocket as you headed for the corner shop to buy some penny chews” and “This damaged my life and many others of my generation”.

It is, however, a trifle odd that Hannan is so nostalgic for shillings, florins and thrupenny bits, given that he was born in September 1971, six months after decimalisation, and didn’t move to Britain until he was sent to boarding school in the Cotswolds at the age of eight, meaning that he never actually used the pre-decimal currency. Still, now he’s got the Brexit he fought so hard for, a man needs a new campaign to pursue!